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A few people have been asking about rebuilding PCs for Battlefield 3, so I’ve posted an incredibly basic guide below.

IMPORTANT: If you have never built a PC then this is probably not the time. If you want to try (and it is actually fairly easy) then there’s a guide here.

For most people, however, I would definitely suggest getting a custom desktop PC build from somewhere like here in the UK or here in the US. (I am really not sure where to recommend for North America, so I am just going on recommendations from internet chums.) For PC Specialist in the UK I know stacks of people who have made purchases and been quite happy, so I am comfortable recommending that. Basically look at the specs below and order your PC accordingly.

The one I am going to recommend is Nvidia’s 560 Ti. We just seem to be getting less issues than with ATi cards, and the Ti version of the 560 is pretty hefty in all regards, which will mean that the real sweet spot for clever graphical features is more obtainable. They’re about $220 or £170, I think.

2. The other performance bottleneck is likely to be your CPU. This is a more complicated issue, because upgrading a CPU will probably mean you need a new motherboard and memory.

Basically the CPU to go for is the Intel i5 2500k. It’s relatively cheap at just over $200, and can be rapidly overclocked in the bios for a bit of extra kick. The issue is, of course, that you will need a socket 1155 motherboard. If you aren’t already on an i5 or better than chances are you won’t have a motherboard that supports it, and that’s a whole other kettle of upgrades. I am not going to go into that here, suffice to say that I am extremely pleased with my full system upgrade based on these sorts of specs, and Battlefield 3 looks pretty good on it.

I cannot stress how useful making your C: an SSD with Windows and some important apps on it is. You will still need a big fat normal HD to store everything else on, but no single upgrade will improve your general computer-using experience more than this. Not relevant to Battlefield, perhaps, but worth stating.

Finally and article that doesn’t jump on the bandwagon of upgrading CPU’s every few years.
For gaming this is definitely true: “1. The most important thing is probably your graphics card.”
I upgraded from an AMD Phenom II X3 720 with 4GB DDR2 to an Intel Core i7 2600K with 8GB DDR3. Difference in games: 0fps.
I then upgraded from an Geforce GTX280 to a GTX580. Difference in games: BF3 beta at low/medium @ 1920×1200 with competitive fps vs BF3 at ULTRA @ 1920×1200 with competitive FPS.
The only cases I have seen where the CPU is the bottleneck is when it’s throttling. One of my friends upgraded to a GTX 560 Ti and his FPS was higher, but still pretty low. So I checked with OCCT, and his CPU was throttling because the Intel Stock cooler is a POS with bad mounting mechanisms. Throttling means: back to 800mHz, at which point the CPU DOES become a bottleneck.
TL;DR: upgrade your GPU first before you even think about any other upgrades. You want better graphics? Get a better graphics card.

I upgraded from an AMD HD6850 to an ASUS GTX 560 DC II OC. My performance in The Witcher 2 went from barely 30 FPS on Medium to 40+ FPS on Ultra. I can actually play Crysis 2 on Ultra and DX11 now, whereas I had to set it to medium settings before and it still wasn’t good enough.

It is very important to take a look at your power supply before upgrading, though. If you have a stock power supply that came with your case or computer, it may not be powerful enough to run the latest GeForce or Radeon. Just to give you an idea, the ASUS GTX 560 requires at least a 550W PSU with 38A on the 12V. If you are using a stock PSU, you are likely to have 22A or something close to it. Fortunately, you can get a 80 Plus-compliant power supply for under $50.

True about needing more options, most guides only seem to cover the budget options but I suppose if you really want to invest you can do your own research. As to having a problem with the game requesting a quad core I would say this is probably a little overdue, quad core pc’s have been common for a couple years now and due to the market leading on console we haven’t been able to take advantage of them until now.

It’s not about having more options, though. Say you go on a spending spree and get yourself an SLI or a Crossfire setup. You insert the cards into your computer and damage your hardware because you were running a 350W power supply that came with your Gateway or Dell. You then write angry letters to Jim Rossignol and blame him for giving you bad advice whereas you had no idea that powerful hardware requires better power supplies. I believe that most stores don’t even publish the exact system requirements for video cards.

Then again I upgraded my CPU from an Athlon 64 x2 at 3.4 ghz to a core-i5 2500k at 4.0ghz and noticed at least an extra 10FPS on most modern games. It really depends on how old your CPU is, heh. I’d say if you have a Core2Duo or Athlon64x2 or older, it’s about time to upgrade.

Argh, wish everyone would stop reminding me I need a new PC! I’m just going to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and pretend everything set to ‘low’ is the way Battlefield 3 is meant to be played. Unfortunately my PC’s in a place where no one upgrade will improve things, just shift the bottleneck to another part of the system. If I get an end of year bonus = new PC. That’s a big if in the current financial climate though :(

On a related note though: If/When I do go new has anyone had experience with DinoPC? My last PC was from PC Specialist who I can also vouch for as awesomes, but DinoPC seem to be even cheaper. Maybe too cheap…?

Have you considered building it yourself? It’s pretty fun and it feels really good seeing what kind of performance you can get out of your own home project. I also sell off whatever parts of value I can find in the old hardware to help offset the cost of new upgrades. When I went to my 570s I managed to ship the 260s I was replacing and it payed for one of the cards outright. In fact I sold pretty much everything except HDDs and MB. It’s worth a look on eBay to see what kind of value you can bring in for old stuff, like a rebate on your new stuff.

Good advice and true. I would stress that it’s probably worth trying the game out on your current system first – even if you don’t hit the minimum specs, just to see how it runs. If it’s acceptable then you’ve time to save/wait for new hardware releases before springing a not insignificant amount of money.

As far as targeted upgrades go the GPU is a a winner though, CPU (esp. Intel) upgrades can quickly snowball into an entirely new system.

Maybe not but if you’re buying a new PC you’ll want it extremely nippy, right? I’ve even added an SSD to my work laptop because I couldn’t stand waiting for stuff to load; I would never go back on any of my systems.

And if you’re playing MP (which everyone probably is) getting into the map first has its benefits. ;-)

My SSD (120gig) has just caused me so much bother – at first I tried to keep my latest games on it but it can’t hold very many and splitting Steam games across HDDs or moving them when you don’t play them any more becomes a hassle quickly. In theory it is great but in practise it’s just a nuisance. Now I just have Windows and my apps on it and games on a separate drive, it still seems to get full all the time but it does certainly make apps load faster. I really think I have wasted more time moving files around than it has saved me by cutting down load times though.

I’m always amazed that people don’t have the patience to wait for the at most 20 second load times that the most demanding of games take to load from a hard drive. The vast majority of games don’t even take much more than 5 seconds.

I just don’t understand how you are supposed to use one for gaming when they can only hold a few games at a time. My Steam folder is about 400gig and not all my games are installed. I would much rather have my games installed on a slow drive than have to either swap them between drives when I want to install a new one or only have a handful installed at once.

I use an SSD for my OS and Steam install and I have a couple of 1Tb drives for all my storage. I install games to the SSD and then when I don’t play them as often I move them to the 1Tb drive and use junctions in Windows 7 to link them back to my steam folder. Only takes a handful of mouse clicks using something like ‘Link Shell Extension’ or ‘Junction Link Magic’.

Get the games you play most often to load quickest, but still have them available to play if you need to free up space on the SSD.

Most games probably don’t benefit much from the SSD, as long as you’re not bothered by a few seconds more loading. But when the game is constantly streaming new stuff it helps, e.g. in Arma 2: I don’t think there really is a measurable difference in fps, but overall it’s smoother without tiny lockups and the LODs load faster if the rest of the system is up to speed.

The beta actually lacked just some of the shinier ultra settings, with most of the stuff that will be available in the release version already there. Still, systems that even surpass a bit the recommended settings had some trouble running the game absolutely smoothly. And everything to the max would definitely require a second graphics card.

I use a quad core AMD too. AMD Phenom 955. Coupled with my 560 I am able to run the game on Ultra at a good FPS (can’t remember exactly what it is i am at work right now but it was over 40 easily) This is on the retail release on single player. will have to wait and see how it is in MP.

It is true that it is not as good as the i5, but if you are on a budget you can get one for half the price of an i5.

I just bought the MSI 560ti Frozr, and it’s ok. But I have had a couple of stability issues and game crashes, particularly since updating the drivers to the nVidia BF3 Beta driver.

For the monitor I got a Dell with 2048×1156 with an IPS panel and it is absolutely fantastic.

And I completely agree with the SSD, though again I know someone who has been plagued with problems with the Vertex 3, so maybe go for the cheaper 2E instead. If you go for the Vertex 3 remember to flash the firmware as this solved most of my friends issues.

One more thing that made a difference to the gaming “experience” was buying a decent soundcard and 5.1 speaker set. I was surprised by how much more realistic the gunfire sounds… and being able to hear people creep up on you is handy in BC2 ;)

This is a very good recommendation for a very important reason – that monitor uses an IPS panel which has much, much more accurate colour than the cheap TN panels used in the majority of PC monitors, and has a very wide viewing angles.

After changing to an IPS panel monitor some time ago, I could never go back. What particually irritates me about TN panels is the way the entire screen changes brightess when you lean back. The main reason I’ve not gone 3D on my PC is all the 3D monitors I’ve experienced are TN panels with poor viewing angles, and terrible colour accuracy.

I have been using a 2209WA (also Dell, also IPS) for a couple of years now, and also cannot recommend it highly enough. The response time on their Ultrasharp panels is fine these days (I think it’s about 5-8ms real-world, rather than the 3-6ms on a TN panel), and they look so much better in every other regard. Nice when you want to get some work done, too.

While I would recommend the Dell U2311H, it’s not an IPS panel, it’s an ‘e-IPS’ panel. It has only 6bit per colour rather than 8bit per colour, so it’s similar to TN panels in that respect. However, viewing angles are pretty good, and the colour accuracy is still pretty good considering it’s not a true colour panel.

Even though it’s not true 8-bit colour, the actual colour accuracy is miles ahead of any TN panel. I’ve got the 2209WA, the first E-IPS panel monitor that Dell produced, and the image quality and vlewing angles have to be seen to be believed. Get one and you won’t be able to tolerate a TN panel screen again.

Another very important factor – which is of direct relevance to gaming – is the very low input lag. This can be pretty high on some monitors, but these dell E-IPS panel screens have very low input lag, making them ideal for multiplayer gaming.

The U2311H is pretty hard to get hands on in the UK now (aside from some silver ones left at amazon). I bought a U2312HM (this year’s model) and it’s awesome :). Input lag measured on the two reviews I’ve read at a tiny 0.5ms!!!

roryok says:
I’m seeing 24″ monitors for around €160 in PC world that seem ok (good contrast ratio, 2ms response time). However, they also have a pretty sweet 27″ Samsung LED TV for €300 (max 1080p) and a few lesser 32″ models.

Someone explained it to me once, and I forget exactly why, but you don’t really need a response time faster than 5ms. Just on raw numbers it is loads for a 60hz unit (not sure about 120hz). Plus there’s a tendency to think that number tells you whether or not the thing ghosts or twitches among other problems, which isn’t true. There were even reasons to think that below 4hz is actually too fast and libel to make things worse in certain situations, but I forget why. It’s not much of an indicator of quality is the thing though.

Honestly just pick up a second hand Q6600 (Must be a G0 stepping one!) on ebay or something – you’ll be able to get one for 30-40 quid, and if you add a decent cooler (£20 coolermaster – which should carry over to your next build too) you can easily over clock it to 3Ghz (they can go much higher, but 3ghz is easy for almost anyone).

Which is all you need for gaming because your graphics card will be the bottleneck unless you a really high end SLI setup.

Disclaimer though, for many older games it won’t be any faster (as they won’t use the extra cores) – hell your E8400 would actually be faster overclocked to say 3.6 Ghz than a q6600 – but for general computing and games that properly support quad core the difference is huge.

I had a E8500 so was looking at this same question for a while (just upgraded whole thing instead though – went with 2500K as above, it is unbelievable how easily that thing overclocks) – but anyway, if you really want to just drop in a replacement CPU then the Q9650 is the top-end for the 775 socket so you’d be looking at one of those, or possibly a Q9550. As above, buy a nice CPU cooler to go with an apply an OC to it too. I don’t think you’ll have much luck without buying second-hand though – the new ones go for so much these days you may as well just replace everything instead.

Oh, I’ll be playing BF3 as well. I just don’t see the point (nor do I have the money) of upgrading now when I’d need to upgrade next year anyway. Might as well wait and either save some money or get better components.

Surely it depends on how close to the screen you sit. At home I was very close to my monitor, whereas here (uni accommodation) the shape of the desk means it’s twice as far away, and consequently my 17″ monitor seems a bit small.

I have to disgree. 30inch monitors are awesome if you have the work space. Do you tilt and crain your head when playing on a big T.V? Of course not, and niether will you on a big monitor. The only real problem is running games at native res (2560 x 1600) requires a bit of horse power. SLI/Crossfire is essential when gaming on such a big monitor/s. Once you get use to a bigger screen smaller monitors seem a little ‘off’.

@Manac0r
I do if I sit close enough. Here’s the question though: if you have to sit at a distance where it isn’t needed to tilt your head anyway isn’t it a financially superior decision to just buy a smaller screen and place it a tad closer to you?

“Enough” is a fairly hard thing to pin down. I do know that my 27″ screen is frikkin awesome. I wonder how I did without it. You really want to play these body aware FP games on something like that if you can, oho yes.

What kind of ridiculous post is this? Why would you want a bigger screen? I don’t know. Because there’s better resolution on them, like mine, a 27″ 2560×1440 monitor, that is like 2 monitors in one. It’s useful for so many things. Games look great, and it runs faster than for instance the linked monitor.

24″ was just too small, with too small a resolution. If you can’t figure out how to look at such a monitor, you are sitting too close to the one you have.

For work, I’d go with anything >30″ anytime. But for gaming, 24″ is definitely exactly right. Remember though, a normal person does have quite some peripheral vision..so I wouldn’t mind going larger that 24″.

Just take care to get one with 16:10..as you missing quite some vertical space with 16:9 (I never quite understood this 16:9 nonsense for monitors other than to the panel-manufacturer’s advantage..)..

If you’re upgrading your system for gaming I don’t see why you would be buying a non-120hz 3d monitor. You don’t have to be using it for 3d for the 120hz refresh rate to have an impact. Upgrading from a non 1080p monitor to a 1080p monitor seems like a waste of cash. It’d be like upgrading form a GTX560 to a GTX580.

I recently (earlier this year) jumped from a 19″ CRT at my preferred resolution of 1280×960, to a 27″ IPS LED-backlit LCD at 2560×1440. Ohhhh boyyyy was that a nice upgrade.

Honestly, the only reason not to go bigger (no matter what you have) is because it requires beefier video cards to power that many pixels. No matter what, you’ll still have better pixel resolution and everything will look shaper and more awesome. If it’s too big for your field of view, you just move it back. (If your desk was designed to hold a CRT, you’ll have lots of room to move an LCD further back.)

I played Mass Effect 1 on my new rig (extremely late), and even with its lack of anti-aliasing, everything looked snazzy because I’ve just got so many pixels packed in to the screen that it doesn’t much matter.

I play on my 32 inch TV whenever I can. Although it’s only at 1080p, I find it more than acceptable. In fact I’m finding I have to play games at 720p mostly to keep an acceptable framerate. Just bought a 6870 which will hopefully fix that issue though.

If I turn down the resolution on my monitor to get better performance it looks terrible. But if I turn down the resolution on my TV it looks ok for some reason.

In response to above as well, there is also the issue of space. For my desktop I wouldn’t be able to fit anything bigger than a 24 inch in my house, for my tv 32 inch is the biggest I could fit.

2560×1440 is amazing, been using it a couple of months now. Wouldn’t go back to 1920×1200 I had before this.

I’d rather have 2560×1600, because I think 16:10 is slighly better aspect ratio, but price difference between cheapest 1440p and 1600p monitors is huge. Got Hazro HZ27WC for £440 (IPS-panel with 6ms response time) and 1600p monitors cost double the price at that point.

I think the height in 1440p and 1600p monitors is pretty optimal and width is certainly not too big. I’d go for 7680×1440 eyefinity-setup, but it would probably take like 4k to build a rig that could run games smoothly at that resolution and some silly quadfire-solutions with overclocking would only cause problems.

All I hope is that 2500K/2x HD6950 is enought to run BF3 at 1440p on even nearly the advertised quality at 60FPS.

exactly the issue I was wondering about. I’m currently using a 19″ monitor that maxes out at 1440×900 so I’m looking at upgrading.

I’m seeing 24″ monitors for around €160 in PC world that seem ok (good contrast ratio, 2ms response time). However, they also have a pretty sweet 27″ Samsung LED TV for €300 (max 1080p) and a few lesser 32″ models.

The monitor does higher resolutions, but my graphics card will choke if I push it higher than 1080p, and honestly why would I want to? I’ll hardly see the difference… but 24″ is quite big, and half the price.

I have a 22″ monitor and a 37″ TV. The jump to the big screen as my main one took a week or two to get used to, but it’s fine now. Everything looks great. I think 32″ would be the sweet spot for me though, overall. My desk is fairly deep so i’m sat back about 4-5 feet from it..

Memory is ridiculously cheap, get 8 GB with your 64-bit winders while you’re at it.

Also, saying building your own PC is easy is slightly disingenuous. It’s easy to put the bits together, but oh boy, if something is wrong it can be quite a task to locate and fix it.

My latest box was badly unstable – I booted up a memtest86 CD and it found bad memory – then I had to locate which of the four sticks was bad. This fixed, my box was still unstable (BSODs, freezes). Let’s just say that updating the firmware on the SSD was not my first idea… Been rock-solid since.

Lars..that’s a thing I don’t really get. While I agree “bigger is better” in most cases..for gaming anything >4GB seems wasted.

You need some spare memory (maybe 1,5 GB?) for Windows to run, sure. But you’re playing only 1 game at a time and most games these days are still 32bit so won’t use more than 2GB anyway..and multi-threading doesn’t seem at a stage where games spawn more than 1 thread yet..

So I’m really curious if that makes any kind of difference except for the bragging rights?

One, memory is faster than hard drives. Yes, even SSDs (though it’s a smaller gap there). Your computer automatically uses any spare memory to cache the files you’ve recently accessed on the disk. You know how most games these days are about 5 gigs because that’s the size of a DVD? Well, if the game itself plus the OS is only taking up about 3 or 4 gigs to run, that leaves you with 4 or 5 — which means you can pretty much have the entire game cached in memory once the assets have been loaded once.

Two, avoiding swap. Windows is particularly bad about managing memory, and will tend to put stuff into swap (paging) a lot sooner than a more reasonable OS would. This starts to slow down loading because it’s using the hard drive when it doesn’t need to be. With 8 GB, you can very reasonably just turn off swap completely — something I would recommend against on a sensibly-managed OS like Linux, but Windows just isn’t good if you give it any swap space.

Three, memory leaks. Where a game starts to expand as you play it and never really levels out. I’ve seen this most with games like Oblivion, but also a little with Dragon Age too. The longer you play it, the more memory it takes, and 8 GB will buy you more time between restarts.

Four, it’s way cheaper than an SSD and gives you a lot of the same benefits (per above). We’re talking as low as $50 for the whole set if you find a good deal. It won’t help with first-time load time (still has to go to disk), but it helps avoid loading again, and avoiding the OS trying to page stuff to disk.

Five, it’s almost always best to overspec your RAM, again for all the above reasons — cheap, highly beneficial. I was using 4 GB when the norm was 1 or 2 GB, and loving it. Now I’m using 8 GB when the norm is 4 GB for gaming, and again loving it. Everything is just smoother with 8 GB, and I’m always among the first handful of people to load that next map in multiplayer, etc.

Both of you are correct though. If you are on a tight budget, there isn’t any point in going over 6gb I think. But at the same time, RAM is really cheap so if you aren’t you may as well stick 16gigs in there.

The other reason is that dropping an extra 4 gigs in later is quite often a pain in the arse if a year or two has passed, as getting matching sticks at that point is not always easy, and if you can’t you will be buying larger sticks and chucking out 2 perfectly good smaller ones. In my mind it’s always best to get as much as is sensibly affordable from day one, or buy the second kit as soon after as you can afford it.

I would suggest getting more than 4gig RAM as well. I bought 4 myself when I got my machine a year or so ago as I had heard that it was more than enough. It’s not. It’s noticeable with heavy Windows use, especially with memory leaks (ESPECIALLY in Firefox) and using lots of apps, but recently I also found it a problem running huge maps in Company of Heroes – the map would take so long to load that the game timed out and kicked me. I’m upgrading to 16gig now.

If you do a little google search im sure you´ll find something.
But oc´ing the sandy bridges is really easy. What you want to do is go to the bios and increase multiplier. Thats it. When you´re done with that check if it boots into windows and stresstest. Keep an eye on the temps that they don´t go above 70C for a nice 24/7 oc. If it fails the stability test you can try increasing the cpu voltage. That can increase stability. But do keep an eye on temps as raising the voltage increases temps a lot.

Spent decades building PC’s, but these days, the cost of a custom build (I got mine from Scan) where you can have total peace of mind with regards to reliability is worth it. We’re talking about as little as 5-10% more than the individual parts in many cases.

Yeah, I was wondering that too. I built my first pc just last month and it was… fine. As long as you read up on enough guides, and don’t put the processor on backwards or something it’s pretty difficult to go wrong. It is risky if something is DOA, since diagnosing from a new system is a bitch, but it’s a small enough risk.

I completely agree. If you have the money for one they are great. But if you are trying to keep costs as low as possible an SSD won’t allow you to play anything you couldn’t before, or turn on any extra wizzy features.

I just upgraded my processor for less than an SSD, some of us are working on teeny tiny budgets.

Crap it, posted in the wrong thread first…..iBuyPower has had a LOT of problems with customer service, shoddy build quality, completely wrong parts, etc in the past. The one to use for custom builds in NA seems to be this – link to ecollegepc.com

You won’t have tons more performance. You will however have tons more heat, noise and powerusage.
A SSD has near 0 seektime. It can handle hundreds of times more I/O operation pr. second compared to a mechanical drive. and it handles simultaneous read/write far better as well. No, you bought the cat in the bag with that setup…

my opinion about ssd is that they are not worth the money. how long does it take programs to start with a hdd and what benefit does a ssd give you? maybe 2 seconds? not worth it imho. i would take the cash and spend it on hdd’s and put them in a raid for extra speed or i put it into a new graphics card.

i spent like 200 euros for a 120gig ssd. sure, windows boots in less than a minute, but what do i care? i should have used the money for a gtx 560ti that costs just as much. or save it and buy a high end card like a 570 or even 580.

if i could travel back in time i would not buy a ssd. just my opinion.

I’ve recently bit the bullet and bought an SSD. 96GB of somewhat mediocre (at least for a SSD) performance for a rather reasonable (at least for a SSD) price. It’s such an extreme difference — I really don’t want to go back anymore. I’ve got it in a laptop and things just open more or less instantly. It’s quite an improvement for work flow and just general joy of using the laptop!

(it cost me slightly more than a 100 Euro — but that’s also about as much as i’d pay. 150-300 Euro for 120gb is really not good value, i think)

I see. All I know is that at the time I built my pc I did tons of research on SSD and HDD drives and at the time SSD offered only a slight advantage in speed but also consistently showed slower WRITE speed than a single HDD. This could have very well changed since then if they improved on the SSD tech.

The most important computer part for me is the motherboard, which I made sure to get one that has good performance in RAID and low latency. I know notoriously slow loading programs like photoshop boot up in seconds for me and I can run games better with a lesser graphics card than friends with better cards without my setup. I’m happy with the results but perhaps SSD has gone a long ways since the couple years ago I built my pc.

Seeing as how the best SSDs you can get have sequential read/write speeds of over 800mb/sec, you’re going to need rather a lot of drives to get anywhere near that. Compared to even the best and most expensive mechanical drives a semi cheap SSD soars upwards with its read/write performance, immediately, after the tiny file sizes. So, sure, you can get decent write and read performance with a huge raid array, but you increase dataloss and failure chance, have way more heat and a high latency compared to the single SSD. 120gb for regular usage is like 150 euro these days. Combine with a modern 2TB storage drive and you’re good to go with a smooth sailing experience that’s just not anywhere near what you get with mechanical drives.

I had an SSD, and I got sick of my OS becoming corrupt and needing repairs/reinstall; so I replaced it with 3 x 2Tb WD Caviar Blacks in a striped RAID array.
Sure, it’s not as fast as the SSD, but the load times are still pretty fast, and I have 6 Tb of disk that fast for less than the cost of a single 200Gb SSD.

It hasn’t failed me once so far. I only have 3 times the risk of failure if you assume that platter based disks are just as likely to have issues as SSDs which in my experience is simply not the case. Besides, if you’re that concerned about keeping your hard disk alive, you should be running a mirror pair or RAID 5 anyway.

What does an SSD have to do with not needing OS reinstalls? You’ve got a problem other than your hard drive if your stuff keeps getting corrupted. I have never ever had to reinstall an OS due to data corruption.

1) Nvidia had more problems than Ati in the beta. A lot more. (Even tho they should do better, “the way its meant to be played and all”)
This is probably gonna be fine with new drivers, but the ones they made for the Beta were quite simple horrible.
2) If you have extra cash I would easily go for a stronger GPU instead of a SSD.
A 560ti is strong, but with just a little bit more power you could go with either higher resolutions (if your monitor support it) or anti-aliasing.
Battlefield 3 uses a serious amount of vram on higher settings, getting a card with 2gb wouldn’t be a waste.
A slightly better Nvidia card or a 6950 radeon would be great.

I just didnt know why my old Athlon X2 processor dying yesterday! Its make me so sad!
But then I realise that Battlefield 3 is waiting on the horizon!
Sudddenly, I say thanks to God for giving me a reason to upgrade my old compatriot so that it will be able to play Battlefield 3 ! Ha.. ha.. Hardware hunting time!!!

Really, an SSD recommendation for video games? It has zero use once you start up the game.

Also you recommend people upgrade to a 2500k, with no extra information?
How about mentioning that many of the ‘cheaper’ intel 1155 mobos won’t allow you to actually OC that 2500k? And telling them which models they should get?

How about mentioning that anyone who already has a decent quad core or any phenom II tri or quad core is already more than set on the CPU side for this game?

What a poorly thought out article.

Oh yeah and while the 560TI is a fine card performance/price wise (considering the poor value ALL cards give right now), its 1GB vram will bottleneck it to uselessness in future games.
It already does in a few games if you play in 1920×1200 or higher or like to use fanmade texture packs.

I made the mistake of buying a 512MB hd4870 3 years ago when people were also ignoring the vram bottleneck thanks to all the console ports. It’s sad to see nvidia putting out 1GB versions of their current low-mid range cards to pinch a few pennies.

The 2gig really is overkill for a single card though. A recent article on Tom’s hardware did a comparison of the 2 gig reference 6950 vs the 1 gig models, and in every case, the 1 gig models did better, due to being clocked higher or whatever.link to tomshardware.com

Keep in mind the 6950 actually benches higher than the 560Ti.

The memory didn’t even come close to being a bottleneck, even on giant resolutions. So if you’re looking for a single card, then 1 gig is plenty.

That said, using Crossfire or SLI down the road, it will be a bottleneck in future games, though it’s debateable whether it’d even be that bad, and whether that’d do you until it’s time to upgrade to a good single card again.

I have a 4 yr old quadcore intel thingmabob 2.4ghz@3.2 w/ 4gb ram, and an asus p5 motherboard (the only bit I can properly remember lol) – and it runs everything just fine, tho I just bought a Radeon 6870, partially for BF3, but mainly for eyefinity, which I love – flying choppas in Bad Company 2 got a whole lot more joyous (see myself as Meg Ryans character in “courage under fire” !) – tho I have no such misconceptions about running BF3 across 3 screens @ 5040×1050 !

Gah! I hate these articles. I want to build a mothership when I get back from deployment, but I seriously can’t friggen tell where to start. Are techniques for building computers changing drastically, or is it just the shiny bits and pieces that I plug in?

I’ve been building my own Windows gaming rigs for about 10 years, and the process hasn’t really changed at all.

Well, scratch that – the software side has changed a fair bit. You’ll have to get used to installing Windows 7 and futzing around with a current BIOS. But the physical act of assembling the components isn’t any different. If you’ve done it before, it’s just a matter of following slightly different directions now.

I think building and overclocking have gotten simpler than they were10 years ago. Power requirements are higher (esp. for GPU), but heatsink and fan technology have gotten better. When I was building my system the most helpful thing was reading through the system builder marathon series on Tom’s Hardware as it gave me a starting point for picking components. When it was time to assemble, sites like toms and guru3d had pretty good guides.

I’ve used pcspecialist in the past and they were great, but my last pc (bought in January) was from chillblast.com. Been really pleased with it, particularly as it came with a 2 year warranty included in the price (though they’ve changed the website since and it makes no mention of the warranty, so you’d have to ask them if it’s still in place I suppose). There *was* a strange issue with my rig after I bought it, but they whisked it back in to take a look, no questions asked, so I can certainly say the service was good in my experience.

Anyway, just thought I’d mention it as another option if you’re in the UK/EU.

Also, are SSDs really worth the money for what you get in terms of space? For the sake of waiting a handful of seconds for something to load, it seems a bit frivolous (then again I’m poor and it wasn’t even an option for me)

I haven’t had a proper desktop in ages, but would still like to play addictive shiny new games (skyrim, i’m looking at you). I like small (13.3-14), powerful systems with long battery times and these things have mostly been abysmally expensive thus far, but the new ultrabooks are shaking the market up a bit — except that they won’t have dedicated graphic cards. The Asus timelinex laptops seem to have similar specs + a graphics card? It’s a GT540 with 2gb of vram. Is that any good for gaming? Is it sustainable? Are there any alternatives in the sub-15” market available or coming?

I ran the alpha and beta decently for Battlefield 3. Think I’m going to put off updating until ARMA III ships, we should see some decent hardware jumps between then and now. Likely go with one of the new Nvidia 3d setups then, too.

Some motherboards offer an auto overclock feature. You can ask it to give you 10% or whatever. You should always go for better cooling if you want to overclock however, but adequate cooling is always going to be cheaper than upgrading.

You should be able to get your x4 955 up to 3.7 GHz – 3.9 GHz on stock cooling. Obviously each individual processor is different but 3.7 GHz would be a good place to start and ratchet it up from there to find your max.

I wouldn’t recommend a 560ti at 220 quid when I just picked up a 6870 for 130, the performance difference is fairly negligible considering the price difference.

Also, the i5s are fantastic. But if you are on a budget, the AMDs give you equivalent performance at lower cost with the option to upgrade without changing motherboards in the future, just make sure you pick up an AM3+.

Ultimately, you should find the best performing kit at your price range rather than being loyal to a brand I feel. Still, I like having hardware advice on here especially in your more casual style free of graphs, keep up the good work!

During the Beta I was running in windowed mode with my desktop set to 1920×1080 with all settings maxed available in beta and was getting 40-50fps and on lowest settings I was getting 50-70fps (which honestly looked better than bad company 2 on low). The beta ran very well on my Q6600 OC’ed to 3Ghz and MSI Cyclone GTX 460 1GB.

I always play at 1920×1080 and only use max settings in singleplayer. I see no reason to have super awesome graphics when playing multiplayer as it only distracts me with the annoying washed out lighting and other graphics effects that add noting to the “fun” in Bad company 2 and many other games. Only exception is having shadows on high setting if I can get 50-60fps.

The monitor linked is really slow. It could suffer from ghosting and other problems with moving pictures.

As for BF3 beta performance, it’s important to note that the visual options were pretty truncated. There were a lot of the really expensive features that were completely disabled; like parallax/normalmapping/tesselation, none of that was in that client.

This might give people an idea of good builds for different budgets. This link is the mainstream one, but they also have ‘budget’ and ‘high-end’ sections if you mouse over the “Do It Yourself” menu section.

I think so far what seems to be the most reliable is Crucial.
Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2 2.5″ 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
With a 5 egg rating on newegg.ca with 145 reviews.
Very few failure reports and most bad ratings are likely user error.
Just ordered it!
/me fingers crossed

SSDs using the newest SandForce controller have been having lots of BSOD and other issues. SandForce and OCZ claim there’s a fixed firmware, as of a few days ago, but only OCZ has released it so far (due to their close relationship with SF) and I’ve seen a few mixed reports about results.

Crucial’s M4 drives don’t suffer from this problem, and they’re relatively inexpensive. The most reliable SSDs still seem to be Intel’s drives, but they’re LOTS of money. Crucial’s a perfectly good consumer-level choice, but keep an eye out – they make M4 drives as well as SandForce drives, so you have to choose carefully.

Nice article, your reccomendations almost mirror my new system, except I went with a 1GB 6950 instead of the nvidia card.

As others have mentioned you should have put some info about motherboards so you can actually benefit from buying the 2500k processor, even if it’s a simple one liner about “make sure you buy a z68 motherboard with this chip”.

To all the people hating on SSDs for gaming, you are foolish! My SSD meant I loaded into the BF3 beta before everyone else and always got to steal the jet/tank! Hopefully they’ll add longer game start timers so all you ghetto people with mechanical drives still have a chance.